Question

I’ve been making changes that involved moving methods around, extracting new methods, and changing functionality a small amount (not all at the same time, but within the same revision – maybe that was a bad decision).

Conventional diffing seems to generate diffs that report that method doFoo was deleted at line 42, and that an almost identical method that is also called doFoo was created at line 2012. Is it easy to ask a diffing program to compare the doFoo deleted at line 42 with the doFoo created at 2012? (Preferably a diff program that is free and available on Ubuntu)

Answer 1

Ediff, the diff tool included with emacs, will help you examine these regions.

You may run into situations when a
large chunk of text in one file has
been edited and then moved to a
different place in another file. In
such a case, these two chunks of text
are unlikely to belong to the same
difference region, so the refinement
feature of Ediff will not be able to
tell you what exactly differs inside
these chunks. Since eyeballing large
pieces of text is contrary to human
nature, Ediff has a special command to
help reduce the risk of developing a
cataract.